“My Dinner with Andrea: The Piece Formerly Known as Torture Playlist” was commissioned by New York Live Arts in 2017. My original idea was to make a dance about the music deployed in the CIA and US military torture programs. I was interested in the similarities between “enhanced interrogation techniques” and performance techniques, especially in terms of minimalism—repetition, endlessness, obsession, release—and how these strategies bend and inflate time. However, making a piece about torture is incredibly distressing. By creating this piece, was I somehow perpetuating torture? Was I benefiting from it? In despair, I abandoned the idea and channeled theater shaman André Gregory from his 1981 film My Dinner with André, creating a new version of the famed two-hour dinner conversation while seeking answers on how to make a dance about torture, examining what it could have been and my own fear of making it. The performance emerges as an amalgam of fragments: fractures of complicity, futility, and desire.

In this work, familiar narratives are subverted: structural, visual, emotional, and physical elements are stolen from iconic films, pop songs, and various forms of choreography. I cannibalize my source materials, turn them into choreographic tools, and claim them for myself. In “My Dinner with Andrea: The Piece Formerly Known as Torture Playlist,” repetition and circling and taffy-pulled timing infiltrate a conversation, a music-video-style dance, a trio dance, and the larger meta-structure of the piece. Two musicians play “Rawhide” on coconuts and saxophone in the theater lobby. A dancer performs a sexy, high-heels solo to an endless loop of “Call Me Maybe” until she finally collapses. The performance space is reset for a re-creation of the movie My Dinner with André—a dinner table for two, a pianist playing a loop of Satie and slowly eliminating notes until he is left with only two.

The bulk of the piece is a conversation between the artists Andrea Kleine and Anya Liftig examining how torture has infected their lives, how it exists in everything from pop tune refrains to what they are eating to their personal histories and to the very art they are making. The piece disintegrates into to dance. It resurrects itself. It refuses to go away. It has no choice but to begin again.